Daniell wrote:I find yours and others post interesting as I too was once wearing the shoes you have put here for others to try on. If you will indulge me I would be very interested in knowing how YOU came to these conclusions with respect to Book of Mormon being false or a fraud. But grant me this if you will, If it is a quote from another man or something you have adopted from a previously expressed opinion please disregard it. I would only like YOUR thoughts and personal experiences. This is a topic of study for me since the days I was in those shoes, I know my story and where I received my conviction of these things, would you please share your story?
Whatta ya say?
Thank you in advance.
Daniel
I don't consider the Book of Mormon to be a fraud. Nor do I consider Christ to be a fraud. But they may both be religious myths, which Joseph Campbell believed. I don't believe there is enough evidence to establish that the Book of Mormon is history. But of course I'm always open to any startling evidence. All non-Mormon scholars I've read do not conisider the Book of Mormon to be history, and some Mormon scholars don't either. Archaeologists Ray and Deanne Matheny are two examples of Mormons who say it simply doesn't fit. I am not aware that they consider it fraud either. I have alternative ideas about how the Book of Mormon was produced, and may yet share them, when I put it all together. To answer your question about ME, just by reading the Book of Mormon I feel it's not history. I'll tell you an experience I had. In the late 1960s I visited the ruins of Pompeii, and walked through the city, partially restored now of course, but I saw plain, hard evidence of the destruction left by Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago. These are the streets I walked through.
The excavated town offers a snapshot of Roman life in the 1st century, frozen at the moment it was buried in August 24 AD 79. The Forum, the baths, many houses, and some out-of-town villas like the Villa of the Mysteries remain surprisingly well preserved.
I saw human bodies still encrusted in hardened lava. I saw their pottery, the remnants of their dwellings, and I heard a lecturer describe in explicit detail what happened on that fateful day in 79AD. How they lived, and what they did.
The Book of Mormon says that hundreds of thousands perished, and volcanoes erupted, presumably something like Vesuvius. The Book of Mormon says the face of the earth was changed, but I have seen no evidence to justify such large scale destruction or geographical changes from anything I've studied. I have seen no remains which we can pinpoint to Book of Mormon peoples. With such a large scale destruction, surely we would have something, don't you think? Surely we would have heard about this from non-BoM sources. The WHOLE face of the land was changed, and cities buried? All we can do is
assume the Book of Mormon people got buried in all this and any trace of them was totally lost. I know of no Mesoamerican archaeologist who will say that these people even existed, including one of the most informed of them, Michael Coe. All we have is guesswork and assumptions - nothing else. Scientists know about volcano activity going back 300 million years. The Cotopaxi volcano in Central America has a list of eruptions going back to 2,600 BC. Volcanologists know every volcano and have given approximate dates of their eruptions, going back well BC. If the "whole face of the land" was changed, or buried, whole cities buried, volcanologists would know this. There is no record of this, to my knowledge, on a scale the Book of Mormon records. Even if a sizeable population, say 100,000 people, were killed in a volcano eruption, scientists would know this. Mt.St.Helens only claimed about a dozen lives, but there have been far worse, of course. I don't know, maybe I'm slow, but my common sense tells me that we would have some record of what the Book of Mormon describes. It is not known how many were killed at Pompeii, but some 1,500 bodies were recovered. I saw many of them when I visited Pompeii. This is one reason, and one only, I find it so hard to connect the Book of Mormon to history. It leaves too much to my imagination!
As for the existence of Christ, most people are shocked that this should be questioned. But I have asked for concrete evidence, contemporary evidence, and I see none, except what people after his time wrote. We don't even know when he was born, with dates ranging from 6BC to 4AD, depending on which hypothesis you believe. We don't have to do this with Julius Caesar, or even Buddah. We have far more of the history of Buddah, who lived some 500 years before Christ. We know nothing of Christ's years from 0-30, except apocryphal legends, some of which have him performing extraordinary miracles as a child, but all apocryphal, nothing historical. His whole life seems obscure.
Having said all that, faith can be a good thing. It can give meaning to people's lives, and the in scriptures I find very inspiring stories, and incredible insights into human nature, but there can also be bad things, like faith which leads to exclusivism, alienation, crusades, pogroms, Inquisitions, witch burnings, and a host of things which divide people. Remember it was the "gentle Jesus" who said, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword, and a man's enemies shall be they of his own household". Is this what we want? Especially IF it's not based on a historical figure?